this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Is there really a doomscroll-free community, besides maybe the mental illness communities? All social media is designed to be addicting.
Not all social media is designed to be doomscrolling, just those leaning on algorithms that drive engagement (aka eyes on the app). We’re in a space where that’s not the case. The interfaces for Lemmy don’t care if we spend more or less time on here. We’re just reproducing the content we’re familiar with in those technologically abusive spaces until we start to realize an alternative.
Tbh, messenger apps are the only doomscroll-free social plattforms, that I have encountered.
Do you not feel engaged right now? Lemmy uses the exact same tools as every other social media platform to keep the dopamine flowing. In the end Lemmy is just federated reddit, but without the ads.
I understand how it'd feel that way on the surface but I promise, Lemmy is far from "Reddit without ads". There may be some similarity visually but the under-the-hood wiring isn't leaning on algorithmic functions that are meant to simply increase engagement at any cost (often by driving anger). Lemmy's engagement is solely in community building. That's why much of the emphasis for "doomscrolling" is dependent on how we handle ourselves here, the content we decide to create.
I find hackerdaily.io to be the perfect implementation of this. it shows the top 100 posts of the previous day for hackerNews in a clean interface.
You can't comment because it's from the previous day but I rarely comment anyways so it's ideal for me.
By whom?
What do you mean by whom? By everyone who is part of creating platforms like these. The most boring social network would be a telephone book.
Notifications, upvotes, likes, feeds, algorithms, subscriptions... are all designed to keep you hooked.
Oh ok, I thought you were talking about the content. Because the original question/post was about the content.
Social media pushes the type of content OP is talking about. Content with interesting/clickbaity titles is rewarded on every social media website. This leads to doomscrolling.
So it´s a sensible idea for OP to try and reach out to the actual people within the community so that they don´t fall for what the design of the platform wants them to do.
Doomscrolling is a widely understood problem. Fighting against it, on a platform specifically designed for doomscrolling is virtually futile imo, maybe our opinions just differ here tho
I don't believe keeping people hooked up was the driving force when e.g. upvotes or subscriptions were designed and implemented for e.g. Lemmy. They are just quite practical and nice features to have.
I suppose if the argument is (is it?) that making sites nicer to use makes them also addictive—and I suppose in some sense that is true—then my counter-argument would be that it doesn't mean that the reason for making them nicer to use was to induce addiction.